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Witness to Jordan Neely chokehold death calls Daniel Penny a 'hero'Whoops, wrong link, not sure how that happened. Lets try again.
Witness to Jordan Neely chokehold death calls Daniel Penny a 'hero'
I do wonder if words can do justice with how threatening Neely was being on that train. I'm reminded of the Always Sunny bit about "the implication".
Probably doesn't matter that much for general conversations. I'm sure it'll matter legally, but when we're having the ethical discussion about it, it's going to just keep coming back to some people thinking that you shouldn't ever get violent with a belligerent vagrant that has not yet initiated any physical force and others not caring what happens to belligerent vagrants. This probably isn't a bridgeable divide and most of the nuance is intellectual window-dressing. Yes, it would be best if the person doing the restraining exercise somewhat more caution than choking a guy to death. Yes, it's also true that restraining someone will not be completely safe for the restrainee, particularly when they're likely high as a kite and experiencing excited delirium. Neither of those points really moves the needle from people's gut responses.
Was Neely choked to death? I was watching Tim Pool and he remarked that Neely was alive and unconscious when police arrived. I wonder if that was him talking out of his ass, then I looked it up more. From Time
I looked and I looked and I looked, and I found no account arguing this fact. Penny did not choke Neely to death. Penny choked Neely unconscious, and he then later died.
I mean, if the media keeps framing what happened in a deceitful way, and people never learn how menacing and threatening Neely was, literally threatening and in saying he will kill someone, than yeah sure. But this is an artifact of a lying media for most NPCs who have a received opinion on this topic. I doubt many people's priors are that someone can literally threaten to kill you, give every indication that they intend to kill you, and you must wait to be dead before you are allowed to do anything about it.
...
This seems a bit like saying that someone wasn't stabbed to death, just stabbed until they collapsed from blood loss, after which they later died. Yeah, if you choke someone unconscious and they proceed to never wake up, they were choked to death. I don't give a shit about Neely, I'm on the side that assumes Penny was a good Samaritan that had no intention of doing any harm beyond restraining the violent lunatic that was threatening people, but I also don't really see what I'm getting from the distinction above.
Unlike stabbing, choking is a continuous action. If you choke someone out, the expectation is that they will start to recover once they're released. "Choking someone to death" is generally expected to mean holding the choke until they're dead.
So if Penny choked Neely out, but released him before he died, that makes the excessive force and negligence claims much weaker. It certainly sinks any accusations of intent.
If he had punched him out, then he hit his head on the ground when falling and died, "beat him to death" could be said to be technically true, but wouldn't exactly give an audience an accurate picture of what happened.
Strangling is continuous, choking isn't (from a wrestling perspective).
A choke has a defined end; which is a tap, unconsciousness, or death. A choke leads to unconsciousness somewhere between 5 and 15 seconds (shit is faster than you think; once it is locked in.) and brain damage/ death in 1 - 5 mins. Assuming that this was a shitty armature choke as from a guy that had a couple months of light combatives once; it is still pretty murder-y.
Any choke that is held for more than 10 minutes is as excessive as shooting a dude 7 times that reloading and giving him another 7.
Given that he surrendered himself and doesn't seem to have intended to kill the dude, manslaughter seems about right.
No, a choke ends when it's released, which can be at any time. What happens afterwards isn't part of the choke.
That clearly didn't happen here though. Neely was fighting back for much longer.
Holding a choke for 10 minutes isn't excessive if the target is still fighting back at 9:50, just like shooting someone 14 times isn't excessive if the first 13 miss.
No, I mean that a choke physiologically CANNOT last longer than about 5-15 seconds. If you have a choke on someone and they are still struggling after that long, it is either autonomic flailing and their brain is about to die or you are actually strangling them.
Basically, there are two levels here. One is there is no safe way to squeeze someone's throat; which is fine. It's not supposed to be safe, it's supposed to be effective.
Two is if you squeeze someone's throat for more than the x amount of time (which is quite short actually), it is +/- equivalent to shooting them in the chest or stabbing them.
This is actually why I think that if anyone puts their hands on you in the street you are fully justified in killing them instantly: the human animal can live through ridiculous punishment then die because throat squeeze ouch.
All this is going waaaaaaaaaaaaay off track from what I started reeeeeing about though; that being that manslaughter charges are appropriate for someone that does something that commonly results in death without premediating or intending to kill the other dude.
"Choke" has been used, by me and the people I responded to, to mean "the act of choking someone". You can, physiologically, very easily hold a choke on someone who is already dead.
If your point is the distinction between choking and strangling, that's just a terminology nitpick.
I'm pretty sure you actually got it mixed up. Wikipedia:
"A chokehold [or] choke […] is a general term for a grappling hold that critically reduces or prevents either air (choking) or blood (strangling) from passing through the neck of an opponent."
But there isn't an "x amount of time". Even when properly applied, you yourself give ranges of time, but when not (as clearly the case with Penny and Neely) it can take much longer. And you typically have the warning of unconciousness before lasting damage. The proper thing to do is to release the choke on that, not after a countdown regardless of whether he's weakly twitching or trying to gouge your eyes out.
The "something that commonly results in death" is "keep holding the choke after unconciousness". You don't expect choking someone just until they stop resisting to result in death, regardless of how long it took.
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Neely clearly was NOT unconscious within 5 to 15 seconds, so all the rest of your reasoning does not follow.
'cause he was getting strangled, which is impossible to do safely. Even a short strangulation routinely fucks your neck up such that you die without medical care.
So, either he was choking him in such a way he would certainly die, or he was strangling the dude (which is also bad, and also ends in death if you hold it for 10+ mins.)
If you're using "strangle" to refer to cutting off air rather than blood, then yes, it is likely that is what was happening. And no, he probably didn't hold it for 10+ minutes; it's not that long between the stations in question.
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